This is a guest post from Nick Persico. He was one of the first people to use Close.io, and has been helping teams get the most out of it ever since. He’s now running sales at Smart Host.

As startup salespeople, we’re in constant pursuit of a scalable and repeatable sales process. We all want our sales team running like a well-oiled machine, but there’s always one aspect of the process that is fragmented and tough to track. The part of the process that seems to be the least repeatable are salespeople’s effectiveness with sales emails.

One question you need to ask yourself is: “Do I know what my sales team is emailing people?”

Probably not. Just like the phone, salespeople always have their own styles of communication. Same goes for email. What they are emailing to prospects is just as important as what they are saying to them on the phone or in person.

But do you look at what they send? Are you spending the same amount of time on email review as you do with call review? Chances are that your salespeople are losing most of their deals in email exchanges.

Here are some sales email tips and templates to help streamline your process on tracking results and training your team to be successful with email.

4 rules to follow with Close.io’s Email Templates

When I work with a sales team that’s using Close.io, I tell them to follow these four simple rules for getting the most out of Email Templates:

Always be testing, but stay in control.

Let anyone on your team put together a template and try it out. Give them the freedom to test any template idea, but let them know that they always need to report the results.

Follow a common email template naming structure.

Always use the same title for the type of email you’re sending.

Associate template names with a specific campaign.

Put the person’s name in the template name to identify who came up with it.

Export the Sent Email Report data every quarter and start all over again.

The list of Email Templates can get long and confusing. Clean everything out and put the best performing email templates back in for everyone to use.

Now that we have some guidelines in place, here are 10 sales email templates that I’ve used in Close.io over the years for different stages of the sales process.

A simple cold email structure

To start, cold emails should have this simple structure:

Subject: {Company Name} + {Your Company}

Hi, my name is Nick with {Your Company}.

We help {specific company type} with {one liner}.

I wanted to learn how you handle {thing your company handles} at {Company Name} and show you what we're working on.

Ask for a quick call tomorrow afternoon.

The structure is simple because you want only one thing to happen. That one thing is a quick call as soon as possible. Don't use the email to explain everything you do. All of that information should be on your website, which they almost always go check out before they decide to reply.

As an example, here is a cold email I would send if I trying to sell Dropbox to a law firm:

The point of writing the email this way is to quickly explain who, what, why, and when. If the prospect opens the email, they will go to the website and decide if they want to learn more. Their decision to reply has very little to do with what your email says. It's all about what your website says.

The email is also soft selling the prospect. The reason for this is because you’re not sure if the prospect is even qualified to buy your product. You just want to learn about what they currently do, and if they are qualified you can move forward and show them what you’re working on.

The follow-up email

Keep in mind that you are asking someone for time out of their busy schedule. Handle the situation with care and make it simple for them. Stop asking them if they got your previous email. They did. They just chose to ignore it.

Move on and just directly seek out what you’re looking for:

Make it as simple as possible for the prospect to respond with what you want. This email clearly states that you want them to respond with a day and time for a call. Adding three explicit times for a call implies that you wrote this email for them specifically. It implies you looked at your calendar and sought out three openings for yourself.

Another helpful tip is to show the times in their time zone. Make it easy for them, don’t make them figure out time zones. That’s your job.

If they reply with a time and it’s already taken, tell them and suggest other times or have a colleague take the call. They’ll understand.

Close.io Time Zone trick: Before you import leads, add a column to your leads called “Time Zone”. Then have your team research which time zone the prospect may be in. Import that column as a custom field. That way you can add a custom time zone to your email template to save time, like so:

Wed @ 11AM

Thur @ 2PM

Fri @ 3PM

The quick feedback email

Quick feedback emails are designed to get people to react to developments with your product or service. When you want to inform a prospect about something new, don’t start from the beginning by pitching them your entire product or service.

Cut to the news you want to tell them, and ask for feedback on that specific thing:

The point of this email template to get a reaction of some sort. The replies will be all over the place, but it will give you some direction on how to proceed with the pitch.

Following up with a lost opportunity

As your product and company matures, your lost opportunity pipeline can be a treasure chest of new customers.

Make sure your team is logging why they decided not to move forward in the first place. With that information, you can send an email reminding them why they didn’t move forward and let them know you’ve addressed it:

Use Custom Fields in Close.io to log the reason why opportunities were lost. So when a new feature gets launched, you can reference the lost opportunities in Close.io with a specific tag and pitch them again. For example:

Create a custom field called “Reason For Loss”.

Make it a drop down selection, so salespeople have to distill the reason down to one thing.

Add selections like:

Budget

Missing “Specific Feature X”

Using Competitor (List the competitors)

Follow up with an opportunity that disappeared on you

We all have experienced them. An opportunity is progressing nicely, then they suddenly disappear.

Don’t take these situations personal. Email them to simply get a reaction.

Again, you’re just looking for a reaction. Following up with the next step will help guide the prospect back on course.

The “I just called” email

Cold calling your opportunities is an effective way to get a quick response. Even if you call them to schedule the next call, it can save you a lot of time and send a message that you are serious about moving things forward.

When they don’t answer your call, it’s best to not a leave a voicemail. Voicemails are annoying, leave a big footprint, and nobody checks them anymore.

Send them an email message instead:

The “what else do we need?” email

We’ve all experienced this situation: You’re at the point in the sales process where you have everything to close the deal. But it’s not closed yet. You say to yourself “there’s got to be something missing”. But what is it?

Here’s an email template to test that theory:

The point of this email is to communicate to the prospect that you’ve done everything they’ve asked. There shouldn’t be anything else, but if you have a suspicion there’s something else holding things up, it’s on you to figure what that is and address it as soon as possible.

Asking for the close

This type of email is perfect to use when you don’t know what do next. You think they’re a great fit for your product, and they’ve even said that. But why aren’t you working together yet?

A good way to measure how far away you are from closing the deal is asking for the close. When you ask early and often, the prospect will tell you what’s missing from making the deal close.

They will give you the directions required to reach your destination. Asking for the close requires you to assume they are going to become customers:

With this type of email, there are really only three responses they can give:

No response (that’s always a possibility).

They respond with a time that works for them and they know your intent is to onboard them.

They respond negatively saying you are moving too fast. In that response, they usually tell you what else is required for them to move forward.

All of these templates are short, why do they need to be templates?

Indeed, the email templates are short and easy to remember. However, the reason they are templates is not necessarily for the content. They are templates to help your team figure out which type of email yields the best results.

If you know that your “asking for the close” template yields a better response rate than your “quick feedback” template, your sales team will be better off.

The content of your sales emails will be a constant work in progress, and the way to make sure that progress is positive is by tracking how they perform.